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Stuff Mike White Likes

In 2004, Mike White was working on a TV show for Fox, and it was not going well. He’d just had four movies he’d written come out in as many years, among them the critically acclaimed “The Good Girl,” starring Jennifer Aniston, and the commercial hit “School of Rock,” which he wrote for his friend Jack Black, and he felt stressed and overworked. Now White and the network were butting heads over the tone and direction of his new show, which was about a dysfunctional family, but which, White says, the network was trying to push closer to family-friendliness. White felt stuck and misled. “I felt like I was throwing a party, and the party sucked,” he says.

The tension reached a boiling point when, after a dispute over test screenings, White sent an angry, late-night e-blast to Fox executives, complaining about the handling of the show. To his surprise, he wasn’t fired, but soon afterward, while writing a script, he experienced a full-blown panic attack. “Tears were coming out of my eyes, and I called my dad and said, ‘I don’t know what’s happening to me,’ and my dad said, ‘You need to go see someone.’ ” The next morning, he found himself in a psychiatrist’s office, where he was told that he needed to go somewhere to relax. “And I’m thinking, you know, the Ritz-Carlton with a burger and tranquilizers. Watch some Bravo, take a Xanax or something. . . .”

The next thing he knew, he was being checked into Aurora Las Encinas, a psychiatric hospital. “And I’m like, look, I’m not crazy! I’m stressed out! So, I run away — I literally run back to my car. And I check my phone, and there are, like, 10 messages from work. . . . All these people who had been making my life a living hell were weeping and saying, ‘Just don’t worry about the show, just get the help you need!’ ” Within three days, the show, by chance called “Cracking Up,” was canceled.

“In a way it was kind of Buddhist,” he says of the breakdown. “It was the worst thing that could have happened. I embarrassed myself in front of all these important people, I proved myself to not be strong enough to figure this out. I felt weak and lost, like a screw-up, and at the same time, coming out of it, I felt like I’d been given a huge gift.”

The first thing White wanted to know after I stepped inside his lovely and serene Spanish-style house in Santa Monica was whether I had watched the first episode of the new season of “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.” Naturally, I had. “When Adrienne calls Kim and she’s rambling like a maniac?” he said. “Kim is like the best thing ever. She’s so sad! It’s so sad. Sometimes, in their fights, you want to prompt them, but they just don’t take their moment. . . . It’s like she can’t hold herself!”

It’s not really surprising, given some of the poignant misfits and oddballs he has created since his breakout hit, “Chuck and Buck,” in 2000, that White would be drawn to real-life personalities whose awkwardness, vulnerability and toxic accretion of bad choices make them equally riveting and hard to watch. Nor is it surprising that his favorite “Real Housewives ” cast member is Kim Richards, the tragicomic former child star (she was in “Escape to Witch Mountain”) with the impulse-control problem and the bullying sister. He loves “the Kims” of the world, as he called them, because they are simultaneously funny, heartbreaking, understandable and human. “Yeah, it’s disturbing when someone has no self-awareness,” he said. “But at the same time, your heart goes out. To me it’s not repelling. It’s totally compelling!”

As a writer, White is intrigued by people in crisis and by the way in which they seem to draw the people around them into a reluctant dance of identification and rejection. His new show, “Enlightened,” about the moral and spiritual evolution of a self-destructive character, stars Laura Dern as Amy Jellicoe, a 40-something sales executive who has an affair with her boss, is demoted and then publicly loses her marbles. She’s sent away to recover at a deluxe New Age healing center in Hawaii where, while swimming with sea turtles, she has an epiphany about her oneness with the universe. She returns to her former job with a commitment to change herself, her company, her ex (Luke Wilson) and the world. Then her company shunts her off to the basement to a kind of land of misfit employees (among them an obsessive I.T. guy, played by White) to toil in obscurity on the most Orwellian productivity software ever devised.

Like most of his work, “Enlightened” is not autobiographical, but it is deeply personal. His experience in 2004 transformed the way he thought about life and work, and he decided to try alternative approaches to therapy. He got into yoga and started reading books about meditation, which lead to books about Buddhism. (The writer Pema Chödrön is a favorite.) In 2005, he went to Utah to write “Nacho Libre” with Jared and Jerusha Hess, the creative team behind “Napoleon Dynamite.” At the airport in Salt Lake City, he picked up a copy of “The Pig Who Sang to the Moon,” a book about the emotional life of farm animals, because the pig on the jacket reminded him of his dog. He read it on the plane and decided to go vegan. White next spent some time in Mexico producing “Nacho Libre,” and after the movie wrapped, he and Jack Black donated their producing fees to charity. Most of it went to the orphanage that Fray Tormenta (“Friar Storm”), the real-life Mexican priest on whom the movie was based, supported for years as a lucha libre wrestler.

“And then,” he says, “I came back, and I was like, I want to go on ‘The Amazing Race!’ ”

The thing about White and reality-TV shows is that he doesn’t just watch them; he joins in. White appeared on “The Amazing Race” in 2009 with his dad, Mel. (They were invited back for an all-star season this past January.) His French bulldogs, Tootsie and Ginger, were featured on “The Dog Whisperer,” and White attended a live taping of “Big Brother” (“You can see me in the studio audience, clapping,” he says). He watches “Survivor,” “Big Brother,” “The Amazing Race,” all the Bravo shows and minor reality classics like “Parking Wars” and “Storage Wars.” He draws the line at “Hoarders” though. “I have such a thing about clutter that to watch a show where somebody collects trash — I can’t do it!”

White’s own house is the kind of place interior-design publications describe as “a sanctuary” — all calming neutral tones and green fronds swaying in the windows. There’s a Buddha on the mantel and bright, jewel-like paintings on the walls. When I met him, he was dressed in a red T-shirt and green shorts, as if for a day at camp. Unlike the socially awkward characters he often plays, he was funny and engaging, his conversation shifting fluidly from the superficial to the serious to the soulful to the totally absurd.

He’s also competitive, which is why he wanted to be on “The Amazing Race.” He finds himself drawn to alienated outsiders, but he also wants to, as he says, “run with the A-team.” He throws himself into things with a single-minded purpose. When his friend Shirley MacLaine suggested he visit a past-life regression guide near Santa Fe, N.M., he went twice, then commissioned his artist friends Sam and Alison Demke to commemorate all 14 of his past lives in acrylic on canvas. Each painting is done in the style of the place and the era, but they all have one thing in common. In one painting, White appears as a medieval soldier dying in battle. In another, he is a Maori tribesman expiring on the beach. In a third, he’s a Gatsby-era alcoholic rake swimming to shore as his boat sinks. “And this is the last one,” he said. It’s a painting of a black woman walking down the beach in her bikini, smiling over her shoulder, and it’s hanging over his bed. “I was a Cuban waitress and I slept with all my friends’ boyfriends and I got an S.T.D. and no one would help me and I died in a flophouse. . . . But look at her face — it’s me!”

Photo

Mike White and his father, Mel, appeared on “The Amazing Race” in 2009.Credit
Chris Castallo/CBS/Landov

Because White’s film characters tend to elicit existential discomfort, he often gets pegged as a satirist. “I don’t know,” he said. “I think I’m more of an absurdist than a satirist. I think I’m more of a — humanist? I hate to say it!” This made him laugh. But it’s an accurate description, in the sense that he returns again and again to the subject of what it’s like and what it means to be human — to try to do the right thing, to screw up, to feel bad, to try again. This is perhaps the most salient quality in his body of work. With the character of Amy Jellicoe, he set out to create the least cool person he could think of and then take her completely seriously. “I felt like it would be such an easy target if it was cynical, if it was just about making fun of her,” he says.

He’s aware, though, that some people think he’s doing just that — making fun. “I would get that a lot — critics writing about how I was smug and mocking. But that’s not my experience of my own work. Maybe smug, but not mocking. Or mocking, but not smug.”

White grew up in the palmy, conservative enclave of Pasadena, Calif., where he attended the prestigious Polytechnic School. His father was a minister at the Pasadena Covenant Church and the ghostwriter for the “autobiographies” by religious-right leaders like Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Jim and Tammy Bakker and Billy Graham. His mother, Lyla, stayed home with Mike and his sister, Erinn. White first began to entertain the idea of becoming a writer — a playwright, specifically — in second grade, where his teacher happened to be Sam Shepard’s mother. Shepard had just become famous for his play “Buried Child,” which won the Pulitzer in 1979 and made a big impact on White for its depiction of the contemporary American family as more or less doomed by secrets.

“I was 8, and I was walking around with a copy of ‘Buried Child.’ I didn’t understand it, but it was about a dysfunctional family that had all these secrets and about this child that was born and killed and buried in the yard. . . . At the time I was like, ‘This is truth!’ I started out writing when I was young; stuff about exposing the truth about how people are not what they appear, about how they are much more dysfunctional than they seem. Pulling back the curtain — that felt smart. But as I got older, exposing how frail people can be seems less and less deep. So now it’s like, how do you approach something — and this is what I was trying to do with ‘Enlightened’ — how do you write something that’s not cynical, that’s hopefully a positive or creative response to the dysfunction of the world?”

When Mike was 11, his father came out as gay to the family but remained in the closet for another decade to protect his career until his children finished college. The experience was difficult, White says, not necessarily because his dad was gay but because it meant his parents were divorcing. As for the effect on his work: “I guess it made me very skeptical about how people present themselves. What’s really the truth. But in a way, it was also really liberating, especially for me to be given the idea that there is no way to live this normative lifestyle.”

After high school, White went on to study at Wesleyan University. He found the East Coast unfriendly and he couldn’t stand the cold, so he abandoned his goal of moving to New York and becoming a playwright and went back to Los Angeles, where he eventually got a staff writing job on “Dawson’s Creek.”

Video

Trailer for "Enlightened"

The impact of White’s formative experiences is clearly reflected in the motifs that run through his work — the importance of uncovering your authentic self, trusting your imagination, creating a meaningful life. His characters often struggle to keep their inner selves in line with their public personae. They compare themselves with others and wonder if they are doing the right thing. They have trouble containing the contradictions in their lives and relating to other people.

Recently, White volunteered to teach English as a second language. He said he had this idea that it would open up his life to people from different countries. “We got in there, and they taught us what to do, and it was like: ‘This is a pen. This is a pen.’ And after a little while, I was like, ‘These people don’t understand me!’ ” The naked bathos of the situation now cracks him up. “Instead of the connection, all I felt was the abyss between my life and these people’s lives, and the sadness of picking up a pen and going, ‘This is a pen!’ ”

“Enlightened” was originally scheduled to make its debut in January, but when White was invited to the “Amazing Race” all-stars reunion, HBO agreed to postpone the show, and he and his dad went back on the road. This time around, the challenges were more grueling. Following a near-naked slog through a Japanese mud pit from which Mel emerged with hypothermia, Mike decided to call it quits. They were sent to an “elimination station” on an island off the coast of Thailand for three weeks, with no phones and no computers and nothing to do but sit by the pool. “Considering how much work I’d walked away from and how many people it had impacted — I was like, what have I done? But it’s fun to have an adventure.”

If White’s approach to his life seems improvisational, his approach to his work is methodical. He likes to start early and writes for most of the day, outlining meticulously. He says he likes writing about women because he is interested in emotion and admires actresses, especially once they’ve reached the age at which they’re no longer expected to serve as role models for the young and gullible. He sees our societal attitudes toward women reflected in people’s reactions to Dern’s character or to Molly Shannon’s character in his directorial debut, “Year of the Dog,” which starred Shannon as a woman who falls apart after the death of her beloved beagle. “Some people thought she was a hero,” he says of Shannon’s character, “and other people were like, ‘Why are you making a movie about this nut job, pathetic loser?’ ”

When White was young, his father often used movies as springboards for dinner-table conversations about morality and ethics. White was drawn to movies about grown-ups struggling with grown-up problems and remembers becoming absorbed by a Diane Keaton movie, “Shoot the Moon,” about a divorced couple, and David Hare films like “Plenty” and “Wetherby” for their ambiguous characters. “I bought ‘Kramer vs. Kramer’ — the paperback version — and my parents were like, ‘Why do you want to read that?’ I was one of those kids who wanted to be in the world of the adult. Even if I guess I’m a kind of puer aeternus,” he says with a laugh. “As a kid I wanted to read Edward Albee and talk about it.”

White still thinks of himself — part of himself, anyway — as a minister’s kid. When he sits down to write, he has something to say. “My dad would prepare his sermons every week, and he was a great speaker; he wasn’t a fire-and-brimstone type — obviously, he was gay and living this double life, and I’m sure it made him much more sensitized to the complexities of things. But I do feel like I have a need to write about how we live our lives. . . . That feels meaningful to me.”

He sees a modern cultural stampede away from sophisticated complexity and toward a shameless escapism — which both fascinates and concerns him. “People talk about ‘guilty pleasures’ now, but that’s all there is anymore.” Then, characteristically, he stopped to consider the other side. “But in defense of the lame choices of the industry — and you see it in our politics too — look how resistant the audiences are to certain kinds of ambiguity. You watch stuff like ‘The Real Housewives’ and you start to think, We’re all so vacuous! Is there any nobility to any of these people? But then you look out into the world, and there are people who are doing cool stuff with their lives. They may not get on a high horse like Amy does, and maybe that doesn’t make for the best drama, but it would be nice to put the spotlight on people who care. Even the ones who are misguided.”

Carina Chocano (carina.chocano@gmail.com) is a writer is Los Angeles. She last wrote for the magazine on Gothic literature and tabloid stars.

Edtior: Adam Sternbergh (a.sternbergh-MagGroup@nytimes.com)

A version of this article appears in print on October 9, 2011, on page MM44 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: Stuff Mike White Likes. Today's Paper|Subscribe